Last week while driving down a side road that used to be classified as rural, I came upon one of those blinking speed indicators that sits beside the road and is used to get your attention when you’re going a little too fast. Typically, the device flashes the speed you are traveling at when you pass it. Sometimes, when you’ve greatly eclipsed the posted limit, the number will rapid-fire at you as if it’s screaming, trying to jolt you into attention to bring things down a notch.

During the most chaotic spans of my life, I’ve kept a gratitude journal.  When my kids were little and I was building a college basketball program, I kept one religiously. It was my calibrator. Every day an avalanche of things that either came out of left field or simply did not go as planned would pile into the front few pews of the sanctuary of my mind. When I’d lay down at night, my head would be packed with all that had gone wrong. I knew a lot had gone right too, but for some reason it didn’t just naturally land in the front rows.  So I had to put it there. 

Several years ago, while working with the Kay Yow Cancer Fund, we struck up a deal with Cintas, the professional uniform company that outfits everyone from chefs to fireman to surgeons, and all those in between.  I had never heard of Cintas at the time. I’d never worn a uniform of any kind (unless athletic jerseys count), nor had anyone in my family, so it never occurred to me that supplying them might be big business. After a presentation about who Cintas was as a company and how they functioned as a community with broader goals for all their people, I became a big fan.  When they agreed to a partnership with the Kay Yow Cancer Fund to sponsor our efforts in the fight against all women’s cancers, I became an even bigger fan. And then something funny happened.

I love a road that’s just about to bend. A season that’s just about to start. A concept that’s just about to jell enough to actually become a thing. Energy lives in those “just about” moments. The giddy kind that makes you think there is no lid on the sky. 

“Always” and “nevers” are skinny slivers with not much room for play, but “almosts” have lots of space where imagination can run and jump. The possibility that lies right around the corner from an “almost” beckons like a giant index finger curling itself back toward its palm.  You might get what you think you want.  You might get something better. You might not get anything but more of the same.  You might get a bottomless pit.  There is no way to know what’s coming.  Not really.  Even if you’ve been down that road a thousand times before.

“We do not apologize for our rigor here.” That’s how the president welcomes parents on day one to new student orientation at Carnegie Mellon University.  If you’re one of the exemplary 15% of high school applicants who gets an opportunity to attend there, sleep better not be high on your priority list.  And if you’re the parent of a student about to embark on the journey, you best leave your helicopter at home. They aren’t messing around. There’s no opening joke.  There’s no awkward drivel about the history of the place. No “Welcome!  Welcome!  Congratulations!” for producing such a prodigious child.  Just a clear cut, “You’d better get ready.”  A straightforward lay of the land.  

Little feet can’t resist big shoes. My granddaughter is closer to two than she is to one and nothing is more attractive to her than an empty pair of grown-up sneakers. Especially her mom’s. She’s determined, too. She’ll work with the focus of a surgeon to slide her feet underneath the laces and then willfully scoot around. Danger is at every turn in the giant kicks that are almost the length of her tiny little leg, and yet she doesn’t seem to notice or to care. It’s as if whatever risk is there is worth it; she will not be deterred. What she wants is to be what she feels like she is when she wears her mama’s shoes: Big.

“God can get tiny, if we’re not careful.” That’s how Gregory Boyle begins his book Tattoos on the Heart. First lines are a big deal.  First lines get readers to read second lines, and second lines get readers to read third lines.  And third lines give you a shot, if you’re a writer, to lasso someone’s heart.  Or if not their heart, at the least maybe their curiosity.

Gregory Boyle had me at hello.

It spills down the mountainside like the mixture of pines, cypress and firs that grow intermingled almost on top of each other. Wonder. The word, dressed in its noun finery, draws you in and then in an abrupt wardrobe change becomes a verb that carries on from there: inexplicable admiration followed by curious grappling of how such things can come to be.  The Rocky Mountain terrain is at once as much a teacher as it is a provider of incomprehensible juxtaposition. A continual “Watch This” from a God who whets our imagination and then gives us a hand-out with a bunch of “fill in the blanks.” 

Bad teams don’t win.  But lots of good ones lose. That’s a truth chiseled into the bedrock below the foundations of stadiums around the world, and yet competitors wish with all their might it wasn’t true. They get it, but they’d rather not. When you pour your heart and soul into a thing, you’d like to know the odds are high that you will get what you have paid for.  Unfortunately, in the world of sports, you can never be so sure. So much can go right and then one little flinch goes wrong and everything you thought you had falls out of the bottom of the bag. Maybe that’s why we love it so much, those of us who stay glued to it. The drama grows magnetic when nothing’s set in stone.

My granny used to say bad things come in threes.  If the washing machine breaks down, you can pretty much count on the air conditioner going out.  And when the air conditioner goes out, you better check on the spare tire in the trunk. A flat very well might be just around the bend. I don’t know that she or any of us ever believed it. All superstitions feel a little hokey to me. But it did seem to happen a lot. Looking back, I think the rule of three was more of an organizational tool used for coping than it was a rule of thumb.  A way of putting brackets around things so we could feel like we were in the clear for a while. But the truth of the matter is things just go awry. 

My first season at Oklahoma was an awkward uphill climb. Our team wasn’t very good, we didn’t understand yet how to work, I was a brand new college head coach, and we were entering a newly formed conference that had juggernauts at every turn. It was evident early that it could be a long, heavy year. When our starting post player quit before the end of the first week of practice, the long, heavy year turned into a boulder we’d ferociously push up the hill only to have it slide back down and flatten us day after day after day. Getting good was going to take a while. About that much, we were sure. So we set our sights on little wins we could cling to along the way. 

Peggy Noonan was President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriter. In her book about him, When Character was King, she devotes a chapter to his humor. Finding the funny and creating it when there wasn’t any was one of Reagan’s gifts. I’ll paraphrase one of her stories in the interest of space and time:

When summer starts to fade, it does so into the vibrant colors of college football. Bands begin marching, cheerleaders start dancing, Lee Corso slips on some mascot’s head, and suddenly battle lines are re-drawn in permanent marker from Florida to Oregon and all spots in between. Stadiums and the towns who house them percolate. The air just feels different, even if the temperature hasn’t changed. Such is the enduring power of college football. Little has as much societal adhesive for a throng of people as the colors they are bound by in the fall.

I played college basketball for a baseball coach. He played college basketball for “the” Henry P. Iba at Oklahoma State University, so it wasn’t like he didn’t know what he was doing. But two out of three days every week, he’d close basketball practice with a metaphor about trying to steal second with your foot on first or a mini sermon about the danger of swinging for balls that were high or wide early in the count. It was always fairly obvious where his heart was most at home.

Last week, the spine of Polar Bear, Polar Bear What Do You Hear? finally broke away. For less than a twenty-dollar bill, I could buy a new one on Amazon that would be on my doorstep tomorrow. But I don’t want a new one. I want this one. This one holds Eric Carle’s story, my son’s bedtime rituals, my daughter’s two year old sing-songy voice, and now my granddaughter’s head bob inside of it. It is a haven, you could say, for my most favorite things.

In the 4th grade, I learned how to sew a patchwork pillow. We did it in class. Parents were livid. They didn’t think we were ‘learning’. Our teacher, Mrs. Henderson, had long dark hair that was thick and shiny, the kind that looked like she brushed it at least 100 strokes before bed every night. She wore bright clothes and a headband that held back her hair, not like a hippie but more like a cover girl who had just washed her face. And she taught us stuff. How to make a pillow is what I remember most.

Perhaps the most debated rule in all of college basketball is the block/charge call when a player is driving to the hoop. Nothing so sways the energy of an arena quite like this officiating decision. Fans bolt out of their seats in either elation or fits of rage when the referee blows her whistle, puts one hand behind her head, and points the other way.

Coaches lose their minds.

In October of 2020, exactly 4 days before Halloween, the sky in central Oklahoma opened up and ice gushed out. No trees had even begun to lose their leaves yet, as the average temperature that fall had been 73 degrees. (Oklahoma’s weather is nothing if not bi- polar.) The rain started in quasi pellets, melty ice drops that clung to everything they touched. And it just kept falling into and throughout the night.

As Tiger began making his way up the hill on eighteen, it was obvious to all who were watching that he knew. The steely-eyed stare that typically acts as gatekeeper preventing all that’s out from getting in and all that’s in from getting out had already packed up and gone home for the day. Tiger wouldn’t be around for the weekend. But that was just facts; it wasn’t what he knew.

For legit fishermen, casting is like breathing. Those who seriously fish toss their lines draped with bait across the air and into the water hundreds of times throughout a day on the lake. And they do so with uncanny precision.  They can whip a line armed with a jig into the crevice of a tight crook of the lake while operating the trolling motor with one foot and never giving a thought about their thumb on the spool of line. The not-thought-about thumb has a critical job, though. Without it working its magic, the cast will turn out in a mess.